Since the first days of January the appointment is every afternoon, every day, at five. As if it were a classic in which the Salvadoran soccer star of all time, Jorge Alberto “el Mágico” González, would play, the boys meet on the field of the Las Margaritas urbanization, municipality of Soyapango, in El Salvador, for “the game of their lives”.
On the playing field, where until a few months ago the shootings caught the players off guard, there are no more shots, gangs or weapons. The field, which until recently was the stronghold of the MS-13 and served as a prohibited border with the other neighborhood in which the southerners of the Barrio 18 gang ruled, is an oasis of peace where children no longer run to hide early and gang members don’t charge for letting cars park near the stands.
“On that court only the gang members stayed. There was a fee of 30 dollars for those who wanted to park, and you had to pay it. And if you had a business, you should also pay him extortion, and if a relative wanted to come visit you, he had to ask for permission and also pay them, ”a resident of the neighborhood described to EL COLOMBIANO.
But since December everything has changed in this town of Soyapango. You no longer see the gang members wandering around with their scarves, tattoos, and baggy clothing, and that old west called Las Margaritas stadium is an oasis of peace since Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele attacked the gangs and set out to exterminate them.
The marks on the walls that indicated which territory was trodden on have already been fading like a ripple in a pond; The homes that previously did not enter because they were robbed or had to pay extortions returned to the neighborhoods; taxis and ubers are once again entering previously off-limits territories. And the small businessmen or owners of commercial premises felt a breather not having to include in their items the payment to the gang members who charged for everything; there are no longer invisible borders, as confirmed by journalists from El Faro who walked through narrow streets that were previously impossible to walk.
“Now you can live better. We are no longer afraid that the gang members with their bugs (youth) will impose their conditions, torture and kill for anything. Now we can play on the field,” says the neighbor who, even without gangs around and many of the gang members in jail, is afraid to give his name because he thinks they can go out and take revenge for the complaints, and end the calm that exists in the neighborhoods of El Salvador.
It all started a year ago
Between March 25, 26 and 27 of last year, El Salvador lived three days in hell. It seems that Satan himself had opened the gates of Hades: in the three days the gangs murdered 87 people. Saturday the 26th became the most violent day of the 21st century when the authorities counted 62 murders and –according to the Center for Information and Police Operational Control (COP)– the homicides that day were perpetrated in 43 municipalities in 12 of the 14 departments from the Central American country.
Salvadorans had not experienced such a violent streak since August 2015, when 57 people were killed in a relentless war, but this time, and unlike what happened 8 years ago, official reports stated that only 13 of the 62 victims of the deadly raid on that hellish Saturday, they belonged to one of the gangs.
It was at that moment that President Nayib Bukele, a snobbish president, with gelled hair and a well-groomed beard, dressed in tight pants and shirts closed to the middle of the chest as if he were a Hollywood actor, went to Congress to request unofficial measures. to combat the unleashed violence in the streets and neighborhoods of his country.
Bukele, the president who was recently elected president in 2019, toured the Presidential House taking selfies and made Twitter a platform for his vanity, his image was falling to the ground due to campaign promises that he could not fulfill, such as making bitcoin. a strong currency for your country; or a simpler one, the delivery of three boat ambulances to the island of La Pirraya that gave him their vows in exchange for his well-being and where, three years later, they are still waiting for them.
The broken promises were added to the whiffs of corruption due to the lack of explanations for the travel expenses incurred with his wife Gabriela Rodríguez, and a murmur that had already been known since he was mayor of San Salvador in 2015, grew like a wave of sand in the desert: he had pacts with the gangs to lower the homicide rate, which made a country of 6 million inhabitants one of the most violent in the world.
This is how Bukele, on March 26, 2022, asked the Assembly -via Twitter- to decree the emergency regime, and with the background and vivid memory of February 2020, when the Salvadoran president entered the hall of congressmen escorted by the Army and the Police of that country to request the approval of a credit of 109 million dollars for their fight against gangs, the Salvadoran parliament was convened at 11 pm. At 3:45 in the morning of March 27, 2022, the assembly members with dark eyes from that night shift and wanting to go home to spend the night – and avoid once again the military and police takeover of the compound – handed over to Bukele on a silver platter a decision that allowed him to run the country, in terms of security, at will: a regime that allowed a person to be detained for 15 days only on suspicion (for their tattoos, for example) and without being presented to a judge or without their right to defense, limit the right of assembly and association and intervene in communications without judicial authorization.
Bukele felt like a child opening one of his toys at Christmas. He transferred those powers to the Police and the Army who, untied, went to the colonias (neighborhoods) to enforce the orders of the Salvadoran president.
One year after the measure approved by the Assembly and which would be temporary, but which has been extended over time, Bukele celebrates. He sells his pacifying plan to the world as successful by accounting for 70 days without registering a single homicide and a downward trend in this crime through his Territorial Control Plan, a fact that catapulted his fallen image to 87% of approval.
In addition, Bukele reports on the arrest of 63,000 people accused of doing evil, all data that cannot be verified, because – as journalists from that country explained to EL COLOMBIANO – official information has been restricted or cannot be accessed, and they only have the one delivered by onegés dedicated to the defense of human rights in El Salvador.
On Thursday afternoon, for example, Nayib Bukele celebrated through his preferred platform. On Twitter he expressed: “We ended the first day of March 2023 with 0 homicides nationwide. We have transformed the most insecure country in the world into the safest in Latin America”.
What the Salvadoran president does not say, but what they do say in the neighborhoods, is that the extraordinary measures given to the Police and the Army have unleashed a wave of complaints of human rights violations.
Descriptions remind of the old song they are looking for youby the teacher Rubén Blades: “If the government arrives pushing citizens and asking for identity cards… They are looking for you to tie you to a chair, throw cold water and a chin of electricity on you.”
They denounce mistreatment and torture
The island of Espíritu Santo is a small town in the municipality of Usulután, in El Salvador. It is part of the Jiquilisco Bay, a giant wetland bordered by the Río Grande de San Miguel, and most of the young people are dedicated to selling coconuts or fishing. There is no gang presence, because the community itself organized itself to prevent these violent groups from reaching those quiet territories.
However, two months ago a contingent of police arrived in the town and apprehended 20 young people engaged in fishing. The only reason they were given is that they had some connection to the gang members and they dragged them away. They ended up in jails mixed with gang members paying for crimes that, their relatives say, they did not commit.
Arbitrary arrests became a daily occurrence, even more so since the Bukele government demanded a daily quota of detainees from the agents, as stated by Samuel Ramírez, leader of the Movement of Victims of the Regime of El Salvador. An aspect that is reminiscent of the so-called Colombian “false positives”.
“The Government gave the police the green light to capture any suspicious person without an arrest warrant, without a judge’s order, and that’s how they grabbed everyone. The real gang members ran every time they committed a crime; they knew how to flee while the innocent youngsters who owed nothing remained in their places and the Police would pass by and take them away”, relates this leader.
The arbitrary detentions were accompanied by other human rights violations. Persecutions for living in a neighborhood where one of the gangs operated and stigmatization of the communities were the arguments with which the Police arrested on suspicion.
“We know of several cases in which the Police arrive to arrest a resident of a neighborhood and they check his background, and, although he did not have it, the agents told him that they would take him that way because they needed to comply with the quota,” Ramírez explains. . He adds that this detention has been going on for more than 12 months and this person has not been released nor has he had due process.
The most serious thing, adds Ramírez, is that when they are captured they are accused of joining to commit crimes and being part of gangs, which ends up leaving them in prison for a long time because there are no defenders and the judicial system is taken over by Nayib Bukele. .
“The government now has everything, it has the Legislative Assembly, the judicial power because it imposed the magistrates, it has a prosecutor that he himself appointed to receive orders from him; he changed the judges: he dismissed those over 60 to leave only young, inexperienced judges submissive to his interests. He prepared the conditions for human rights to be violated here. Lawyers are of no use, because they do not defend those deprived of liberty, the Prosecutor’s Office monopolizes all information and public and private defense attorneys do not have access to it.
Arbitrary arrests and persecutions triggered another phenomenon that was also caused by gangs: entire families began to move to other neighborhoods or municipalities and other parents chose to confine their children to prevent them from going out and for the mere fact of having a tattoo or long hair end up in jail and, contrary to Chapulín Colorado, without anyone to defend them.
Abraham Abrego, director of Strategic Litigation of the Salvadoran NGO Cristosal, an entity that has registered 3,219 complaints against the Government for the violation of the rights of 3,344 people, told EL COLOMBIANO that they are no longer just arbitrary detentions, there is also torture that do to those captured in prison.
“It is a dramatic situation because there are already more than 100 people who have died in state custody or sometimes due to torture or lack of medical attention; So, let’s say that it has affected various levels in communities and people,” Abrego said.
The most curious thing is that, in the words of the director of the NGO, most of the arrests are of young people who have nothing to do with the gangs and invent some kind of crime or suggest some crime for those captured, but the leaders of gangs have not been caught.
That is where the argument that Bukele has an agreement with the gang leaders to reduce homicides in El Salvador gains strength. Some of them have been requested for extradition by the United States (see facsimile).
Abrego says that while Bukele sells the idea of a mega-prison to put in 40,000 gang members who “will never see the sun again”, the social fabric in El Salvador has cracked, in the neighborhoods they mistrust each other and neighbors, sometimes out of revenge, point out to others who end up in jails.
In Las Margaritas they don’t feel safe, although gang members are no longer seen and the Police are still on the streets. In the middle of the conversation he yelled for them to wait for him, and he said goodbye to meet the daily appointment of playing a soccer game that may be his last free game.
